No One Lives

A psychopath (who is behind the kidnapping of an heiress and the slaughter of her college friends) dukes it out with a group of thieves who love to burgle wealthy houses, responsible for an opening massacre of a rich family returning from vacation. The battleground is a rural location near a scuzzy, run-of-the-mill motel and the surrounding area nearby (including a junkyard). It isn't much of a competition, however, and the results are relatively one-sided despite a "strength in numbers."
**


I would like to say there's more to it than the synopsis suggests, but this is, for all intensive purposes, a body count movie. Adelaide Clemens has the closet character in the film to someone we can root for, but even she is burdened with a cold part (intentional, because of what the psychopath slowly drove her to, by manipulating her over time, such as performing a procedure to ensure a slice made by his own box cutter blade doesn't leave him dead) with a face or performance that never surfaces emotion of any kind besides indignation and eventual rage. Granted her Emma continues to be put through the ringer at every turn, but because she has been "conditioned" by Luke Evans (the psychopath of the film) to subvert a great deal of hysteria (and fear seems to have been also alleviated), it isn't a surprise she remains the final girl by film's end. Evans is stone cold, absent any emotion, including when he savagely kills the gang one at a time. Of the cast, Derek Magyar leads the pack of thugs as most applicable for Krug's bunch in Last House on the Left. He's a creep, out to pick a fight or shoot somebody at any point and time. He's game for some hellraising. Despite all the violence, No One Lives never approaches Last House or Day of the Woman in terms of discomfiting female sexual abuse, although it is suggested that part of Evans' "training process" is to manipulate his kidnapped girls (those "he loves") into becoming "his", sexually and emotionally. There is a scene where Magyar is about to force Clemens into a sexual encounter she escapes by "having to use the bathroom." This leads to my favorite scene where America Olivo (one of the gang) is taking the longest shower in the history of cinema, with Clemens sliding against the wall to catch her breath. Olivo offers the chance for Clemens to use her gun. The two women eyeball each other, and, for me, it seems as if Clemens takes a nice look at Olivo's naked form before pointing the gun at her. Olivo doesn't flinch, sliding open the shower curtain just a bit more, looking Clemens dead to rites, with the scene ending without incident. This feeds to Clemens packing the gun, Magyar answering the door to a cop's knocking, and a bullet hits said cop square in the eye. The finale features Evans and Magyar in a fight, with Clemens getting shots at both of them. Olivo's fate, through the use of a choke hold and shower curtain, is certainly an eye-raiser thanks in large part to its monstrous force...Olivo's eyes turn blood shot and her face literally suffocates as she fights for air. Evans has no qualms using whatever weapon is available and lacks any form of guilt or conscience that might usurp such gristly methods. Like the wood chipper (he has a potato sack loaded with the victim's chum remains), a sickle (when the victim's perforated by it, she asks why he'd kill her ("she hadn't done anything"), and calmly essays that she was just unlucky), a pump-action shotgun (exploding a head when firing it at close range), and the use of a running engine (as the accelerator pedal was pressed to jump start a jeep). No mercy, no compassion, Evans just brutalizes, with his eyes and demeanor vacant of personality and emotion, a void where humanity should be present. He seems to only react when his "girlfriend" (I'm starting to wonder if she was a kidnapped victim at some point) purposely suicides on a butcher knife (held to her throat by WWE pro wrestler, Brodus Clay); their kidnapping (that's the film's initial irony: a kidnapper kidnapped) is the genesis of a new kill list for Evans to carry out. A pair of handcuffs as a stabbing weapon, and a massive body as a "place to hide" are interesting uses of Clay as victim.

There's plenty of moments (in close up, especially) where Clemens understands (and informs them) that those in attendance will more than likely all die horribly. She seems to hold up pretty well under the impending circumstances. Her resolve and nerves of steel keep her alive...that and Evans "sees something in her." Magyar is just human excrement. He's a thug with a gun who likes to wave his supposed control around because he's willing to use violence whenever it benefits his welfare. Clemens looks right at him and seems to hold her own when he flashes his weapon at her, draws in to her face with his, and uses his aggression as a means to pose a threat to her. In the end, she withstands because of her courage and "mental toughness" (probably due to the time spent with her killer as he used his pathology as an influence to deplete her of "the weaknesses of human emotion"). Evans carries a torch for Clemens and puts himself in harms way because of his affection for her, and if Clemens were a crack shot (which, no surprise, she isn't), he'd have been a goner. I think the problem the film poses is that the characters in collection give us few to care about in the least. This is a typical criticism in slasher/body count movies, but when you have a psychotic hunting crooks who flee the massacre of a family, there's just a numbness there. We just watch the carnage ensue...no doubt, though, the viscera is on full display and is probably the sole reason to see this. The reason to see it sure isn't because of the characters. Lee Tergesen has found himself a niche in the horror genre as a recognizable face mainly with characters who range from shady to heroic (compare this character of his to the man hunting for his employer's daughter in The Collection (2012)), all just about dying in some ghoulish fashion. His woodchipper demise here is particularly memorable if just because of the sound his body makes as it is turned to mulch. While Tergesen was a crook, he wasn't as vile as Magyar, often trying to rein him in, always unsuccessful.